Material You, Made For You
-By Devanshi Garg
This article is a part of the Debugged Magazine released by Coding Club of Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. To read the entire magazine click here
Following last year’s disappointment of cancellation of Google I/O due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, Google launched its first all-virtual event this year. This time in its annual developer conference, Google gave us a hint at what to expect from Android 12 with the release of its first-ever Beta version. Android 12 introduces a new design language, Material You.
It has come seven years after the introduction of Material Design. In 2018, Google had tried to allow developers to customize their apps by Material Theming. As computing continues to grow, the demand for expressiveness and personalization over various screens has increased. Google rethought the entire experience to meet this demand, “from the colors to the shapes, light, and motion.”
Material You aims to make the design more humanistic and “celebrates the tension between design sensibility and personal preference. Without compromising the functional foundations of apps, Material You seeks to create designs that are personal for every style, accessible for every need, alive, and adaptive for every screen.”
Users generally use custom images to personalize their screens; building upon this insight, material you has introduced wallpaper-based theming or “color extraction,” which pulls out dominant and complementary colors from a user’s wallpaper and utilizes them as a color scheme for screen’s menus and first-party apps.
Along with customizability, material you also provides better clarity and ease of use over information density. The default lock screen clock will be unmissably huge, with big elements like widgets, buttons in the Navigation Panel, making us choose fewer things but important ones. The main reason behind making elements bigger is to make the whole UI One-Handed for the user. From a UX perspective, the more oversized shapes make it easier to touch, swipe, slide various elements using thumb only.
The notification panel has gone through a couple of changes. It is now more intuitive and playful, with a crisp, at-a-glance view of your app notifications, whatever you’re currently listening to or watching. The Quick Settings within the notification panel have been rebuilt completely. The number of settings in the panel has been reduced, and more contextual information has been added about each one. This provides clarity and is customizable to include your preferred options. Google Pay cards and Home Controls will now be accessible via quick settings tiles instead of hidden behind the home button menu, which has now been reserved for Google assistant. Google has now prevented apps from customizing notifications from default to provide a more consistent look.
Another noticeable change comes in the form of page headings. Headings are now much larger and start a little lower down the page, making it easier to reach interactive elements positioned high in a list. Scroll up, and the heading collapses to take up a smaller footprint and allow for more content on the screen, much like Samsung’s Android skin does already.
Google has also worked on motion and animations along with colors and shapes to bring about a more fluid experience to users. Material You designs can adapt to different screen sizes and types. It leverages “motion to help understand space, convey brand, and elicit trust.” To make the UI more playful, it has quirky minor interactions here and there. The elements are designed to be stretchable, so they can morph into whatever shape is required as you move around the OS.
Personalization includes an essential aspect of accessibility. Google makes this possible by sharing control of contrast, size, and line width, with a contextually aware system that can customize UIs in more ways than previously likely to tailor UI for every user. Material You focuses on Bolder Text which makes user read the text more easily which increase the accessibility of the UI design.
Material You is first coming to Android 12, specifically Pixel devices, this fall. It will then come to the web, Chrome OS, wearables, Smart Displays, and, eventually, all Google products.
Android 12 will introduce other features like offering more transparency around which apps access their data and increased focus on a user’s privacy. Material You is, however, one of the most anticipated new updates, it is still in beta, so google might introduce some more new features. Be sure to keep an eye on that.
“Material You is a new design that includes you as a co-creator”- Matias Duarte
